A Year in Fan Projects: 2012 In Review

This has been an interesting year for Ultima fans for several reasons, not the least of which has been the many developments and revelations about Ultima Forever that have come to light. But as exciting as the prospect of a new Ultima game is, we would be remiss if we forgot that the Ultima flame, and enthusiasm for the series and the stories it told, has been kept burning bright in large part due to the efforts of those determined, devoted fans who have taken it upon themselves to develop all manner of patches, utilities, and remakes of and for the various Ultima games. And a lot of those projects have reached significant milestones this year.

So as the year closes, let’s look back over the various fan projects that saw development in 2012.

The remake continued to make smooth progress into May, and saw the implementation of the desert areas of the world map and animation frames for Iolo’s nighttime lute playing. More graphics, and Buccaneer’s Den, followed at the end of June.

October saw much progress made with books and scrolls, among other updates. The team had begun collecting book content submissions earlier in the year, and reported at this time that they had received several excellent entries. Bee hives and the Ant Mound were implemented in November, and a few pieces of new art came to light at the beginning of December, and some new paperdoll art was released just prior to the new year. All in all, the Ultima 6 Remake was one of the more active projects in 2012, and remains one of the more hotly anticipated as 2013 begins.

Xarton Dragon’s Portable Ultima Patches are a convenient way to apply updates to many of the Ultima games, especially on non-Windows systems. Using an open-source delta comparison method, Xarton’s utility can update each game very quickly, potentially using very little drive space in the process. At the beginning of 2012, he added support for the new Exodus Project Ultima 3 Upgrade package.

Ultima 1 Revisited

Kingspud’s attempt to re-create Ultima 1 from scratch morphed, toward the end of 2011 and into the beginning of 2012, into a tutorial of sorts, which saw Kingspud stepping line by line through Ultima 1’s assembly language. He tnen promotly disappeared until October, in which he posted an “away but not gone” notice, announcing the delay of the project due to the arrival of toddler into the midst of his home.

Pix’s Ultima Patcher

Contra Xarton Dragon’s more cross-platform approach, Pix’s Ultima Patcher is a strictly Windows-only utility, although it achieves the same end, allowing the user to simultaneously patch any installed Ultima game(s)…even one the ones from GOG.

The Beautiful Britannia team published a handful of screenshots as January drew to a close. But rather than just show off their new textures and be done with it, they instead posted comparisons between the unpatched look of a scene and its enhanced look. And in many cases, the difference (and level of improvement) was striking!

Kevin Fishburne’s Ultima-inspired, man vs. nature MMORPG, Sanctimonia, has been maintaining a very steady rate of progress throughout the year. In January and February, Kevin focused on server optimization and improving network transactions between the server and the game client(s). He also spent some time re-working player gear management, and began to lay the foundation for the implementation of digging and terrain deformation. At the beginning of February, he had also begun working on the combat system in the game, which uses variables such as “mass” and “edge surface area” to calculate not only the damage done by a weapon or object, but also the degradation (if any) in weapon performance over time.

In December, the project’s website was cleaned up significantly, and numerous updates were made to the game. Kevin Fishburne also settled upon a plan to monetize the game; your first life will be free when you play, and additional lives will cost $0.99. Which, at least on the face of it, sounds like a very effective way to allow players to pay — quite literally — for only as much game as they want, although one can imagine that one may end up going through lives fairly quickly at times when playing through Sanctimonia; the good Mr. Fishburne isn’t shying away from making the PvE as unflinching and brutal as the real world can often be.

Ultima IX: Redemption

We haven’t heard a lot this year from the Titans of Ether about their Ultima 9 remake, Redemption. That’s due in no small part to the fact that some of the team, at least are helping out with the OpenMW project, in preparation for transitioning the project to that engine (it currently uses Morrowind as its base). In January, the team released a few screenshots of the various areas they had been working on, and also teased the existence of a secret village somewhere in the mod.

Thepal’s attempt to remake Serpent Isle using the Oblivion engine is something of an oddity in the Ultima remake scene, as it is one of the only project that is attempting to do a straight remake, without the addition of any new content or quests. Of course, the going has been a bit slow for the project this year; it began 2012 on hiatus, and was further set back by a hard drive failure in March. Thepal came up with a creative way to save himself some time in rebuilding the mod to where it had been prior to the crash, inviting Ultima fans to submit their pictures for use as templates for character models.

Although it’s tempting to think of Forgotten World as the “other half” of the Beautiful Britannia project, and although the two projects share resources and a website, they are in fact separate projects, with separate aims where improving Ultima 9 is concerned. Beautiful Britannia is focused, primarily, on enhancing the look and feel (and land area) of Britannia, whereas Forgotten World is focused on correcting issues with the game itself…bugs and the like.

That release happened as planned; the version 1.19h update corrected a number of bugs in Ultima 9…including the Moonglow catacomb elevator, the demon death bug in Valoria, and Dermot hanging out at the pub all the time. It also apparently fixed the floating lady in Dawn and the floating runes/sigils bug. The team also released some pointers on how to alter the game’s settings to improve its performance and significantly reduce the frequency of crashes.

Another update came in early April, which added some new decorative textures. He didn’t release another update until September, which saw a much-refined texture package featuring redone armour and gem textures, as well as other touch-ups.

This attempt to translate Ultima V: Lazarus into Spanish has been quiet — dormant, really — for a while, and the same was largely true toward the beginning of the year. An update in February was meant to assure us all, I suppose, that the project was still ongoing,

Eric Fry’s cross-platform engine for Ultima 6 was relatively quiet for the first couple months of the year, but rang in the month of March with the release of version 0.3 of the project. This update saw the implementation of character creation and the other introductory sequences of the game, as well as many other movement, interaction, and object usability features. And as it that weren’t enough, some exciting developments began to materialize in mid-March…including images of Ultima 6 running in a fullscreen mode that did away with the (ugly, to some) scroll-inspired UI of the original game.

September dawned with the release of Nuvie version 0.4, which saw the fullscreen mode implemented for all to try, a new roof tile system, a new Ultima 7-like interface, key-binding, and many other small improvements and bug-fixes. And in December, the project was crowned the Fan Project of the Year by Ultima fans.

Britannia in Minecraft

As if his excellent Ultima-inspired texture pack for the game weren’t enough, Zeph Grey also announced in mid-March that he would be attempting to implement a large-scale version of Britannia in the game, using the WorldPainter utility. An update in April showed off the scale of what he was building; in his rendering of Britannia, the walk from Britain to Minoc would be a journey of several days.

Intended as a spiritual sequel to Ultima Online, Project Drake, which we first heard about in May, aims to cross the sandbox experience of UO (and some of the other Ultima games) with elements from Morrowind, Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, and even Fable.

This project first popped up in July of the year…or, at least, that is when I finally got around to reporting on it. It touted itself as being inspired by Ultima 6 (at least in part), although at first glance it was difficult to see the connection: the game is not a fantasy title, is not set in a far-away world, and features a range of Old West firearms as weapons instead of swords, halberds, and crossbows. At the same time, it featured an interactive world and a plot setup that do indeed homage the Ultima series, a tough (but engaging) combat system…and it even won some praise for its quirky, humourous plot.

This attempt to tell the story of the Serpent Isle in the years following the apocalyptic events of Serpent Isle remained fairly quiet all year, appearing on the radar in August to announce the addition of new team members. They also showed off two different sets of new portraits by their talented new artist, although there has been little news from them since then.

This project appeared on the scene in late November, first as a Kickstarter campaign, and then as an Indiegogo campaign. The developer describes it as being inspired by Ultima (Ultima 8 and Ultima Online in particular) and Minecraft, and the final result he is hoping to achieve is a hybrid of the play styles of those games.